Daily Life Shifts of Identity
A simple daily life practice is to....
- Notice whenever there is an I vs. other dynamic created. (Often associated with discomfort, a sense of disturbance, of having something to protect or defend, muscle tension, shallow breath, and so on)
- Find what is seen as "I" (often a particular thought, sensation, emotion, reaction, behavior)
- Examine it. Is this too a form in the world of forms, an object in the world of objects? Is it experienced and separate from the experiencing?
- And when the answer to those questions is revealed more clearly as yes, then recognize this too - which I temporarily saw as "I" - as just another form and object in the manifest world. It is no different from a room, a computer, a flower, a sound. It is an object arising in awareness.
One is the question Can I be with what I am experiencing now? This too separates the experienced from the experienced, and shifts the center of gravity (the identification) to the experiencer.
I can come to the breath and the movement of the body, which also shifts the center of gravity to the Witness, to formless awareness.
I can use the Big Mind process, and find myself as the changeless ground in which all the different personal and transpersonal voices arises, as the changeless context and the changing content.
I can find ourselves as headless. As capacity for the world, as emptiness full of the world.
And yet another is Byron Katie's inquiry, which releases my attachment to (and identity with) a particular thought and reveals myself as this pure stainless choiceless experiencing.